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Time for Aer Lingus to jettison its passengers

Airlines go bust, and that is certainly the fate in store for Aer Lingus if it continues on its current flight path. The airline is burning through its cash reserves at an alarming rate and is carrying the wrong kind of "passengers" - highly paid employees who still enjoy allowances and perks that were embedded in the business during its long period in state ownership.

There are other problems. Aer Lingus is grappling with a 460m hole in its defined-benefit pension scheme and must engineer a solution to its problems while competing with Ryanair, probably the most aggressive operator in the business.

The announcement last week, therefore, that the company is seeking 676 redundancies from its 3,900 payroll to save 97m a year by 2011 was inevitable.

Newly installed chief executives usually use their honeymoon period to implement the decisions that their predecessors flunked, and then throw in a few other